


but the merry-go-round stays constant

by boarsnsmores



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Swan Queen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 06:11:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6144091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boarsnsmores/pseuds/boarsnsmores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You were red. Then you were purple.” She blurts out instead and wow no, that was definitely not what she was going for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but the merry-go-round stays constant

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [31 days of fanon Swan Queen](http://swanqueenfanon.tumblr.com/post/140172734365/announcing-31-days-of-fanon-swan-queen-fandoms) because why not it sounds like fun.
> 
> [The experiment](http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/) if you're curious. It's "Change blindness to a very slow change." Couldn't find it on youtube, sorry.
> 
> Un'beta'ed as all hell, written in an hour and I had an idea but probably lost it somewhere along the way.

At a museum event or something (Emma doesn’t quite remember the specifics. It’s not like she wanted to go but Regina did so of course Emma went too.) Regina makes idle small talk with another couple and Emma sometimes interrupts with an errant quip. It’s going well, even if Emma would rather be at home, until one of them asks, “So, who made the first move?”

“Both of us.”

“Neither of us.”

The answers come out at the same time and they look at each other in surprise. This is not the kind of incongruous answer that they bicker over with a silly story using lines from a script they’d long since memorized. Not an answer that can really be elaborated in front of two strangers anyway and Emma’s trying to think of a way to keep the conversation going when Regina smiles and says simply, “Well, I suppose it depends on who’s telling the story.”

And the conversation moves on, just like that, the couple regaling them with the silly story Emma expects from these kinds of things, the kind of silly story she sometimes wishes she and Regina had because then maybe, it wouldn’t be a story of almost almost’s - emotions and people pushed to the brink and almost off it, fingers fraying as they grasped at cliff edges and almost slipping, happiness fleeting and bought with blood and sacrifice and almost not enough. But then, it wouldn’t be their story and Emma doesn’t wish that more than she wishes for easy.

(New York had been easy.)

Emma thinks about that moment for the rest of the evening.

* * *

Emma doesn’t like silence. Maybe it’s the loudness of loneliness she’d like to avoid or maybe it’s just years of TVs in foster homes that’re the closest thing to ‘home’ she has, but she buys herself a tiny television, cheap off of a yard sale, and falls asleep to Billy Mays and late night shows.

One night, she can’t sleep so she watches the least staticky channel, which plays a documentary on the human mind and perception. She scoffs at the people who get so focused on the map that they miss out of the person swap (she’s a bounty hunter – she’d never miss something like that) and doesn’t see the gorilla until they point it out to her. Fat tables and long tables are actually the same size, they’re all the same shade of grey, and those lines are all parallel. It’s all drivel and this memory should have been forgotten in its entirety, but Emma remembers it (denies the gorilla) because although she doesn’t have the words to put to her relationship with Regina, she has this memory.

_Notice when the image changes_ the narrator tells Emma and the screen shows a picture of someone setting up a red merry-go-round against the skyline of the city. They’re painting the stem and some horses have been installed. She’s already suspicious from the gorilla incident so she expects one of the horses to become a cow or for the city to become field or something else sneaky but blatant when pointed out. She’s staring so hard, it startles her when the screen flickers to black and the narrator’s voice continues.

_Did you see it?_

Lies, Emma thinks, nothing changed. She would have seen it, she knows it. But they show the before and after pictures and damnit, she’d missed it – the merry-go-round turned purple, so slowly and innocuously that she hadn’t even thought to look for it.

* * *

The car ride back is mostly silent, an awkwardness set in from the evening about a thing that neither party really wants to initiate the conversation on. It’s one of those things they don’t really talk about because, Emma thinks, there’s never been a need to define this thing in labels and milestones anyway.

How would she even try to label this? What sort of precedent is there for having found family in a once-Evil Queen and the kid they share? When did they blur the lines between what they were to each other and what they did for each other? Emma hates Regina, but saves her from a wraith anyway. Regina hates Emma, but gives her Henry ages 0-10 anyway. They were very bad at this hate thing.

Were they like a series of events, effect following cause and piling up like rolled snow that then swallowed them whole and carried them with it? Or were they like a tree, growing more branches, growing taller and stronger, year after year until the storms couldn’t wash them away? When did want become need (or is it the other way around) and which one came first anyway? That’s not even considering fate (Fate), which Emma staunchly refuses to.

No, Emma thinks, it’s not a thing that needs a marker in the timeline of their lives. It’s always been her and Regina, in whatever shape it’s happened to take. Like the pull of planetary bodies toward each other (thank you, late night documentaries), a universal certainty.

Emma still wants to talk about it though, because they’d given different answers and Emma likes to think that Regina thought about this as much as she’s thought about it. She’s going to bring it up and it’ll be romantic.

“You were red. Then you were purple.” She blurts out instead and wow no, that was definitely not what she was going for.

Regina doesn’t get it, but as Emma fumbles out an explanation about maps and a merry-go-round, she takes Emma’s hand in hers and Emma thinks she gets it.

**Author's Note:**

> I told myself this would be half an hour and 500 words and I got neither one right.
> 
> On [tumblr](http://boarsnsmores.tumblr.com/) if you want to hit me up.


End file.
